, and in
the distance the forests looked blue. Nothing about them stirred. They
had sighted no game as they passed; the deer had already fled before the
Indian army. The skies, bright and blue in the morning, were now
overcast, a dull, somber, threatening gray.

"Men," said Mr. Ware, and there was a deep gravity in his tone, as
became a general on the eve of conflict, "I think we shall be on the
enemy soon or he will be on us. There were many among us who did not
approve of this pursuit, but here we are. It is not necessary to say
that we should bear ourselves bravely. If we fail and fall, our women
and children are back there, and nothing will stand between them and
savages who know no mercy. That is all you have to remember."

And then a little silence fell upon everyone. Suddenly the hot-heads
realized what they had done. They had gone away from their wooden walls,
deep into the unknown wilderness, to meet an enemy four or five times
their numbers, and skilled in all the wiles and tricks of the forest.
Every face was grave, but the knowledge of danger only strengthened them
for the conflict. Hot blood became cool and cautious, and wary eyes
searched the thickets everywhere. Rash and impetuous they may have been;
but they were ready now to redeem themselves, with the valor, without
which the border could not have been won.

Henry Ware had suddenly gone forward from the others, and the green
forest swallowed him up, but every nerve and muscle of him was now ready
and alert. He felt, rather than saw, that the enemy was at hand; and in
his green buckskin he blended so completely with the forest that only
the keenest sight could have picked him from the mass of foliage. His
general's eye told him, too, that the place before them was made for a
conflict which would favor the superior numbers. They had been coming up
a gorge, and if beaten they would be crowded back in it upon each other,
hindering the escape of one another, until they were cut to pieces.

The wild youth smiled; he knew the bravery of the men with him, and now
their dire necessity and the thought of those left behind in the two
villages would nerve them to fight. In his daring mind the battle was
not yet lost.

A faint, indefinable odor met his nostrils, and he knew it to be the oil
and paint of Indian braves. A deep red flushed through the brown of
either cheek. Returning now to his own kind he was its more ardent
partisan because of the revulsion, an